The Birth Of 'Ethical Oil'..and..The Coming Oil-Shale Revolution...

The Birth Of 'Ethical Oil'

"I started doing this math, trying to quantify ethics," Levant says. For example, using United Nations estimates of the number of people killed in Darfur and the Energy Information Agency's estimate of oil produced in Sudan, he calculated "how many millilitres of blood (there is) per barrel of oil in Sudan."

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The Coming Oil-Shale Revolution

In terms of reserves, it is estimated that conventional sources across the world can yield around 1.2 trillion barrels, while in the United States alone, anywhere between 500 billion and 1.1 trillion barrels are thought to be recoverable from oil shale. An immediately astonishing observation to draw is the low-end of the estimates for U.S. oil shale, which is still around twice as large as Saudi Arabia's total reserves.

What makes this issue particularly relevant now is the emergence of reports on a potential breakthrough in oil shale extraction technology. Traditionally, extraction of oil shale has required the use of a method known as "fracking," or "hydraulic fracturing"
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The Green Thing...

In the line at the supermarket, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment."

He was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, pop bottles and beer bottles to the source. They sent them back to the plant to be washed, sterilized and refilled and re-used. So it could use the same bottles over and over. So they weren't recycled ( until they broke ) they were re-used.

But we didn't have the green thing back in our day...

h/t Miss Trixie